To get the information you need when you need it there needs to be
Accessible
and
Correct (or good quality)
Nowadays Wikipedia is the 'go to' place for information. It's certainly accessible but is it good quality?
I have been timidly editing Wikipedia dental pages for around 10 years now (very timidly, infrequently and sporadically!). I've found that the dentally related pages are often out of date, have a skewed (and often commercial) perspective and aren't usually written for the general public. So I was delighted when I heard about the initiative between The Cochrane Collaboration and WikiProject Medicine to improve the medical pages and also the dental pages using the high quality Cochrane evidence. What is even better is that some of the work for this initiative is coming from the University of Dundee, Dental Students.
I attended a Wikipedia editing training session for the students and early career staff at my University today. I was asked to talk to the Dental DRAMS about evidence and different types/ how we can have confidence in it.
The hierarchy of evidence or pyramid that used to be talked about is considered outdated and too simplistic now. For example, certain questions can only be answered in certain ways. However, I think it still gives a useful framework for those who are quite new to research types to start to hang everything on and give a starting point for appreciating that not all evidence is created equal. I sit Guidelines along the spine of my pyramid and include Qualitative Evidence as a speech bubble outside (to avoid it getting forgotten about as it so often is).
I find that one of the most difficult concepts to get across is that although we have increasing confidence in certain kinds of evidence some of the 'lower' levels of evidence, if very well carried out, can be better 'quality' than evidence types that might be 'higher' up the pyramid.
Back to the Wikipedia editing event - well, it seemed to be a success and I'm looking forward to reporting on the results of the Dental DRAMS progress in editing Wikipedia and improving the quality of the evidence there.
The Wikipedia editing event went really well and now we just need to keep up the momentum and get bold with some of those edits!
